Page 55 of Rescued By the Dog Trainer

"Tendon is intact. Radial pulse is strong." I flush the metal grit out with sterile saline and blot the margins clean with gauze. "This needs half a dozen stitches right now. We need to get you down to Cole at the clinic."

"Nobody is driving down that icy pass for a scratch." Griff looks away across the yard, his shoulders rigid.

"Then sit still." I tear open a foil packet of nylon suture from the kit and lock the curved needle into the steel jaws of the driver. "Hold the flashlight over his arm."

Jason steps in close, angling the heavy beam flat across the boards so the shadow drops away.

I set the first bite two millimeters from the wound edge, turning my wrist with the fluid mechanics drilled into me over eleven years. Pierce. Roll. Pull through. The nylon slides black against his skin. I throw a surgeon's knot, squaring the loop with one swift tug, bringing the tissue together flush.

Griff exhales through his teeth, his knuckles white against his knee, but he holds still despite the pain.

Four more throws close the gap. Snip the tails. Swab the line with iodine. I place a non-stick pad over the closure and wrap his arm with elastic gauze from wrist to mid-forearm.

"Go see Cole at the clinic tomorrow afternoon." I tape down the final turn of gauze. "He'll write you an antibiotic script and check the margins."

"Understood. That's cleaner work than the corpsman did on my leg in Helmand." Griff pushes up from the step, flexing his fingers once to test the tension against the fresh wrap. "Thank you." He turns across the frozen yard toward the bunkhouse, Chief keeping pace at his knee.

The porch light hums over my head. My hands have blood on them. I step to the outside spigot and crank the handle. The freezing water burns over my knuckles, washing the red into the drain stones.

Jason stands on the step above me with a towel and waits.

He hands me the towel. I dry my hands.

"Stay."

One word, the way he gives orders. But he's looking straight at me under that yellow light with his hands empty at his sides. He's said it.

"The clinic. The spring kennels. That side of the table." He takes one breath. "All of it. Stay."

There it is. The offer I've wanted for a week, from a man who doesn't ask anybody for anything, before I've told him what I am to him.

I can't take it with the notebook still zipped and his name in my hand.

"Tomorrow." My voice drops into the calibrated cadence that tells a wounded man he's not dying. "There's something I need to tell you first."

He nods once, stepping back to give me room. Demanding what isn't freely offered has never been his way.

SIXTEEN

Out Loud

JASON

The zinc scoop bites into forty pounds of dry kibble with a sound like crushed gravel.

Barnaby ignores the feed bucket. He sits square against my left boot with ears pinned toward the yard, black nostrils flaring against the draft under the double doors. Working dogs read tension before a man speaks. The four-cylinder rumble climbing the switchback isn't Brody, and it isn't Griff.

Tires hit the cattle guard at the perimeter. Iron clangs against iron.

"Easy." The word leaves my lips flat and low, meant for Barnaby, but I'm the one who needs to hear it.

Barnaby presses seventy pounds of warm muscle into the canvas of my bibs with ears rigid as the 4Runner's idle drops into park outside the tack shed. He supports me the best way he knows how.

Twelve hours ago on the lodge porch, I stood under the yellow bulb with empty hands and surrendered three years of armor. Stay. The clinic. The spring kennels. That side of the table. All of it.

She looked at me with the calibrated calm of a flight nurse telling a wounded soldier he isn't going to bleed out before the bird reaches altitude.

Tomorrow. There's something I need to tell you first.